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Comment by pjbk | Hacker News Reader

Unless the author is attempting to redefine GOFAI, ML and NN were very much techniques of "old" AI. The perceptron was invented in 1949 and there was already plenty of prior art.

Large scale models prove computers are very good interpolators. They also make evident they lack common sense.

Every time there is a new release of ChatGPT, Copilot, Bard/Gemini, etc. I challenge them with a simple non-computable problem like an example of the PCP. Every time they fail trying to nail down a correct solution. And worse, they try to convince me they can solve the problem and their answer is correct, showing that a computer is still behind pulling the strings.

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> Unless the author is attempting to redefine GOFAI, ML and NN were very much techniques of "old" AI.

What definition of GOFAI are you using here? Wikipedia states:

> In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, GOFAI ("Good old fashioned artificial intelligence") is classical symbolic AI, as opposed to other approaches, such as neural networks, situated robotics, narrow symbolic AI or neuro-symbolic AI. The term was coined by philosopher John Haugeland in his 1985 book Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea.

> Thus, Haugeland's GOFAI does not include "good old fashioned" techniques such as cybernetics, perceptrons, dynamic programming or control theory or modern techniques such as neural networks or support vector machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI

Humans can't do that either. If you read Scott Aaronson it's pretty clear that humans that "acknowledge" various non-computable "truths" are not actually doing what they represent themselves as doing.

https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/finite.html

Interesting. I really enjoyed the books by Penrose and Cohen.

A human certainly cannot solve a non-computable problem by "playing" computer. However the insight that is created by trying to solve (or invent, in Post's case) something like the PCP, and then the ability to intuit and then prove there cannot be a solution by a non-human, is still an open question. Penrose has his quantic processes inside microtubules explanation which seems a very up your sleeve answer. I don't know if that would be too different to a massively parallel machine with true stochastic non-determinism.

In any case attempting to compare the brain to a computer and calculating the maximum number of states in terms of bits for me is not fair. There are certainly hard physical limits but that pertains the question of consciousness tangentially.

GOFAI is defined in terms of the types of methods used, not in terms of the year in which the method was invented. GOFAI and ML have always existed concurrently, and always will.

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